Yes but they greatly enhance readability and are carriers of information. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. There are so many cliches that apply here.
> they greatly enhance readability
Do you have any evidence for this? My native language is not English and we use the Latin alphabet. The case for titles is the same as for regular sentences. We are doing fine. I would even say that the English title case feels somewhat odd and confusing. Titles are also virtually always set apart / rendered differently as normal text so I fail to see how normal case for titles loses information and how title case helps in any way. Actually, I even believe that title case sometimes loses information. Capital letters mark (Mark, btw :-)) proper names, this marking is lost with title case and this may sometimes bring ambiguity.
US street and highway signage went from all caps to mixed case in the past 30 years. I believe the US Department of Transportation did studies and found mixed case was easier to read. Although they use a non-standard font.
so that is an argument in favor of using lowercase.
It is known that mixed casing does disrupt reading [2], which gives some weight to the idea that the shapes of words and letters does affect reading.
For myself I know that my reading speed and comprehension suffers when reading title cased sentences. This leads me to always "fix" [3] documents I update or otherwise contribute to at work when others do it for headings, subheadings, headers and footers.
[1] https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9293635/
[3] I say "fix" because I know it's a generally acceptable formatting method when writing, I just don't like it.
I said being able to see the word shape is very helpful. I did not say that you can read based on the word shape alone.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-re...
> The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text.
> Haber & Schindler (1981) found that readers were twice as likely to fail to notice a misspelling in a proofreading task when the misspelling was consistent with word shape (tesf, 13% missed) than when it is inconsistent with word shape (tesc, 7% missed). This is seemingly a convincing result until you realize that word shape and letter shape are confounded. The study compared errors that were consistent both in word and letter shape to errors that are inconsistent both in word and letter shape. Paap, Newsome, & Noel (1984) determined the relative contribution of word shape and letter shape and found that the entire effect is driven by letter shape.
Word shape is not relevant to anything.
My question would be from title case to normal case for titles. We already know that normal case is readable, that's what we use for normal text.
We also know (?) that people speaking another language with a Latin alphabet don't have trouble reading titles.
(French, but I think that's also true for Spanish, Italian and many other languages. I don't know if German have a specific case for titles like English but they have an upper case letter for common nouns).
I suspect English is the only language to use special, though not standardized, rules for titles.
if they do at all, the benefit is not worth having an entire second alphabet to learn, and deal with, imho (i.m.h.o. i-m-h-o, etc)
there are many other, and better, ways to improve readability
On title case in particular, I wonder how you would feel if it was applied to everything in the text, and not just the title. Would it be more readable ? For me personally it absolutely wouldn't and I'd be infuriated after three lines.
Then if most people were on the opposite side, I'd think we'd have at least a few prominent use cases where all the text would be in title case, and I can't think of any.
Is title case's point to just make it clear it's a title ? If so, we have so many better ways to convey that (bold, underlining, spacing, positionning, bullets and markers etc.). On the baby and the bath water saying, the more I think of it the more I see Title case as just a relic of some old practice I'm not sure why we cling to in this day and age...what's the baby, what am I missing ?
No they don't. It is true that modern readers read lowercase text more quickly than they read capitalized text.
And it's also true that, after a small amount of practice reading capitalized text, the difference in reading speed becomes zero. There is no benefit of any kind to the lowercase letters.